The Corporate Basis Of The Trump Immunity SCOTUS Case

     While the history of corporations can be traced back over 500 years into England, the history of corporations in America can be traced back to the 1790s. Between 1790 and 1860 over 22,000 corporations were created by special legislative acts, and then starting in the 1840s and 1850s general incorporation laws were introduced. Between 1865 and 1900 the Robber Barons took advantage of corporations to create monopolies in steel, railroads, oil, and other areas. The basic concept of a corporation can be found in the name of an LLC, which stands for a Limited Liability Corporation.

     The most basic example of why corporations exist is to limit the liability of a rich person that wants to build a bridge. In the past, worker safety laws were quite lacking, and it was not uncommon for workers to die while building a bridge. So a corporation had to be formed by the one rich person and a few of his friends that will limit their liability when workers die and their widows file lawsuits. Incorporation protects the personal assets of the rich from legal seizure by the poor. Even in modern times with worker safety in mind people die building bridges, despite using giant safety nets under the entire Golden Gate Bridge project, 11 workers still died, 10 in one day when a section of scaffolding fell through the net.

     Donald Trump grew up in corporate culture, he uses umbrella corporations and shell corporations, and launched his own stock styled DJT, and has regularly filed bankruptcy over the years to additionally protect himself and his personal assets. And this appears to form the core of his immunity defense in front of the Supreme Court argued at the end of April 2024. His argument is that a president can never feel free to do things that could lead to deaths (like calling drone strikes on people) unless they have nearly total immunity from prosecution by political opponents after the fact. That is nearly the same argument as to why a corporation has to be formed to build a bridge, because it makes the corporate investors totally immune from wrongful death prosecutions when a worker dies building the bridge. Without corporations providing immunity to the primary corporate investors no bridges would ever get built in America. And in a similar way, Trump's argument is that a president can never feel free to perform his or her duties as president if they were constantly worried about how a drone strike on a terrorist leader could end up getting them prosecuted or locked up.